Increasing earth's population?

[Theoatmeal2 (OP)]

Could I drain some of the oceans or similar to
To make more room for pops.

Or just for fun make every place a tropical paradise?

[Droll]

Planets that have a hydrosphere will have a certain amount of water vapour in the atmosphere.
Adding or removing this vapour with terraformers will change the amount of water covering the surface.

When it comes to carrying capacity and planet that has a hydrosphere greater than 75% of the surface will suffer a penalty to population cap. Reducing water down to this level makes sure you have maximum capacity. Unfortunately, this means that there isn't much you can do to increase the population capacity of earth this way.

But there is a workaround using massive orbital habitats. Just make an orbital habitat that has a capacity in the order of tens of millions and use the factories on earth to build them. Needless to say a station that massive is probably not being tugged anywhere anytime soon but it will allow you to increase the workforce size of earth beyond its carrying capacity.

[Tikigod]

Planets that have a hydrosphere will have a certain amount of water vapour in the atmosphere.
Adding or removing this vapour with terraformers will change the amount of water covering the surface.

When it comes to carrying capacity and planet that has a hydrosphere greater than 75% of the surface will suffer a penalty to population cap. Reducing water down to this level makes sure you have maximum capacity. Unfortunately, this means that there isn't much you can do to increase the population capacity of earth this way.

But there is a workaround using massive orbital habitats. Just make an orbital habitat that has a capacity in the order of tens of millions and use the factories on earth to build them. Needless to say a station that massive is probably not being tugged anywhere anytime soon but it will allow you to increase the workforce size of earth beyond its carrying capacity.

Tugging  such things isn't all that bad, I often have terraforming stations in the tens of millions of tonnage and providing I make my tug fleet ships larger with nice beefy engines they can pull them along decently enough.

[Droll]

Tugging  such things isn't all that bad, I often have terraforming stations in the tens of millions of tonnage and providing I make my tug fleet ships larger with nice beefy engines they can pull them along decently enough.

How big are your tugs?

The useful sizes of station for orbital habitats can easily go into 100s of millions of tonnage if you really want to expand a planets capacity.

Ultimately creating additional habitation is not cheap and should always be done from a position of resource security.

[Rich.h]

While all bodies have a hard limit on space available, you can work around it somewhat. By altering (requires SM mode) the population density modifier you can get larger/smaller populations on any given world. I tend to reduce it on my current game due to my Empire being more of an open green spaces sort of culture, opposed to massive high rise cities. This has the side effect of forcing me to colonise other worlds where before I would ignore them due to lack of minerals etc.